Are We Exposing Ourselves to a Black Swan Event?
There’s no cure for Ebola.
Ebola is deadly and contagious. 90% of those who catch it die quickly.
Normally, the extreme lethality of Ebola means that the virus quickly “burns itself out”. Specifically, if a villager eats an infected fruit bat and comes down with Ebola, it quickly kills the villager and everyone around him … and then the spread stops because it can’t travel to the next village over.
In other words, extreme deadliness of Ebola normally insures that it doesn’t spread very far.
But – for the first time in history – it is now spreading worldwide. As Michael Snyder notes:
#1 As the chart below demonstrates, the spread of Ebola is starting to become exponential…
#2 This is already the worst Ebola outbreak in recorded history by far.
#3 The head of the World Health Organization says that this outbreak “is moving faster than our efforts to control it“.
#4 The head of Doctors Without Borders says that this outbreak is “out of control“.
#5 So far, more than 100 health workers that were on the front lines fighting the virus have ended up contracting Ebola themselves. This is happening despite the fact that they go to extraordinary lengths to keep from getting the disease.
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As Paul Craig Roberts so aptly put it the other day, all it would take is “one cough, one sneeze, one drop of saliva, and the virus is loose“.
As Dr. Sanjay Gupta notes, there have been lapses in safety at the Centers for Disease Control and U.S. hospitals in treating infectious diseases.
So why is the U.S. flying in Ebola patients to be treated on U.S. soil?
Yes, I feel sorry for the American aid workers who were trying to do good in Africa by helping those infected with Ebola. But the risk of losing containment of this beast is too high.
